CWU secures new service providers agreement with eir which will provide new opportunities for organising and winning with workers Over the last number of decades outsourcing and the use of third party service providers has become prevalent in the economy with many large companies utilising these practices to save money, increase profit and hand-over control of non-core activities to ‘specialist’ companies. In response to this workers secured protective legislation known as TUPE which secures, at a basic level, terms and conditions of employment and collective bargaining for trade unions. However, as these business trends have developed employers have found ways […]

Trade unions remain the most tangible and most effective way to reduce inequality. Unionised work-places tend to have fairer, more transparent and more equitable pay models, which provide pay increases year by year for workers above inflation. They redistribute wealth from the surplus value created by workers that would otherwise go to profits (or dividends and executive pay) to workers’ wages. However, as unions have weakened, and union density throughout the economy has weakened, all workers have suffered. Low pay has become more prevalent, inequality has grown, and contracts have returned to the more “flexible” model of the nineteenth century. […]